Security is an important problem for any compute platform having data that resides in a storage device. Malware threats are growing at exponential rate. Malware (e.g., low level malware like rootkits) is getting stealthier and is attacking the host (personal computer) system stack far below the protection provided by anti-virus/anti-malware (AV/AM) approaches. Once low level malware has infected the system, a state of the system as seen by AV/AM is in control of the malware.
The AV/AM approaches provided by independent software vendor (ISV) applications desire access to virus and malware information in the storage device to assess the nature and level of security threats posed by virus and malware at any given instant, as well as to assess the impact (e.g., return on investment (ROI)) particular AV/AM actions taken in a network may have. This includes securely logging which viruses were detected, which viruses were cleaned, when the viruses were cleaned, etc.